The mission of the Air Force is like a highly complex machine. Each piece of the machine is vital to it operating successfully. The E-9A Widget is a very small, yet highly important piece to that machine.

Arnold Engineering Development Complex engineers at the National Full Scale Aerodynamics Complex assisted in recent testing of sub-scale parachutes for the next mission of the Orion spacecraft, Exploration Mission-1.

Air Force photograph When flown without tethers, the Avrocar was unstable and could reach top speed of only 35 mph. The grainy film showed a round ship floating out of a hangar. Its silver, aluminum exterior glinted in the sun as it hovered a few feet off the ground. As it glided over a pool…

ATK has been awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with an $84 million ceiling for First Article Testing and production of the FMU-143 Bomb Fuze for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Initial orders under the contract are valued at $52 million. The U.S. Army’s Contracting Center at Rock Island, Ill., issued ATK the award…

Raytheon has fired eight precision-guided Excalibur Ib projectiles during qualification flight tests at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz. All eight rounds landed within five meters of the target, meeting stringent test objectives. “This program has made great achievements in a very short amount of time,” said Lt. Col. Josh Walsh, the U.S. Army Excalibur program manager….

AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems, an operating unit of Textron Systems, a Textron Inc. company, announced Oct. 22 that its Aerosonde(R) Small Unmanned Aircraft System logged 168 flight hours in the frigid, harsh climate of Antarctica, supporting meteorological research by the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Department of Atmospheric and…

Honeywell has been awarded two contracts worth a combined $221 million to continue its highly successful support of the U.S. Army’s M1 Abrams main battle tank program. Honeywell’s AGT1500 vehicular gas turbine engine is the proven power source for the M1 Abrams and provides the tank with superior power and torque, low noise, and smokeless…

NASA photograph by John McGrath NASA’s modified Airborne Science C-20A is seen on the parking ramp at Yokota Air Force Base near Tokyo, Japan. The aircraft, carrying the UAVSAR mounted in an undercarriage pod, was deployed to conduct a radar imaging mission of Japan’s active volcanoes. NASA’s Airborne Science C-20A aircraft, carrying a specialized synthetic…

A newly formed technology center created by Boeing and Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China has announced that Hangzhou Energy Engineering & Technology, Co., Ltd., will conduct the center’s first research project. HEET, a company with experience developing alternative energy technologies, will focus on ways to convert discarded cooking oil into a component of sustainable aviation…

Raytheon photograph Raytheon has been awarded $51 million to build more airborne radios and continue to modernize future radios for the U.S. Army. The upgrade will significantly increase satellite capacity for soldiers. Raytheon has been awarded $51 million to build more airborne radios and continue to modernize future radios for the U.S. Army. The modernization…

Ever increasing threats and the need for force protection by systems that provide constant situational awareness of one’s surroundings prompted Lockheed Martin to add a persistent surveillance option to its Dragon series of ISR systems. The latest member of Lockheed Martin’s Dragon Family of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance is Dragon Sentinel, an option that includes…

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NASA Image of the Day

Pushing the Boundaries of Propelling Deep Space Missions

Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center are advancing the propulsion system that will propel the first ever mission to redirect an asteroid for astronauts to explore in the 2020s. NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission will test a number of new capabilities, like advanced Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP), needed for future astronaut expeditions into deep space, including to Mars.
The Hall thruster is part of an SEP system that uses 10 times less propellant than equivalent chemical rockets. In a recent test, engineers from Glenn and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, using a Glenn vacuum chamber to simulate the space environment, successfully tested a new, higher power Hall thruster design, which is more efficient and has longer life. “We proved that this thruster can process three times the power of previous designs and increase efficiency by 50 percent,” said Dan Herman, Electric Propulsion Subsystem lead.
Hall thrusters trap electrons in a magnetic field and use them to ionize the onboard propellant. The magnetic field also generates an electric field that accelerates the charged ions creating an exhaust plume of plasma that pushes the spacecraft forward. This method delivers cost-effective, safe and highly efficient in-space propulsion for long duration missions. In addition to propelling an asteroid mission, this new thruster could be used to send large amounts of cargo, habitats and other architectures in support of human missions to Mars.
Image Credit: NASA
Michelle M. Murphy (Wyle Information Systems, LLC) Read More

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